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Home and work : housework, wages, and the ideology of labor in the early republic / Jeanne Boydston.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Boydston, Jeanne.
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Housewives--United States--History.
- Housewives.
- Wages--Housewives--United States--History.
- Wages.
- Home economics--United States--History.
- Home economics.
- United States--Economic conditions--To 1865.
- United States.
- Genre:
- History.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (xx, 222 p. )
- Other Title:
- Housework, wages, and the ideology of labor in the early republic
- Place of Publication:
- New York : Oxford University Press, 1990.
- Language Note:
- English
- Summary:
- Over the course of a two hundred year period, women's domestic labor gradually lost its footing as a recognized aspect of economic life in America. The image of the colonial "goodwife," valued for her contribution to household prosperity, had been replaced by the image of a "dependent" and a "non-producer." This book is a history of housework in the United States prior to the Civil War. More particularly, it is a history of women's unpaid domestic labor in the context of the emergence of an industrialized society in the northern United States. Boydston argues that just as a capitalist economic order had first to teach that wages were the measure of a man's worth, it had at the same time, implicitly or explicitly, to teach that those who did not draw wages were dependent and not essential to the "real economy." Developing a striking account of the gender and labor systems that characterized industrializing America, Boydston explains how this effected the devaluation of women's unpaid labor.
- Contents:
- Introduction
- An "Oeconomical Society"
- "A New Source of Profit and Support"
- "How Strangely Metamorphosed"
- "All the In-doors Work"
- "The True Economy of Housekeeping"
- The Political Economy of Housework
- The Pastoralization of Housework
- Notes
- Bibliography - Index.
- Notes:
- Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph
- Includes bibliographical references (p. 197-215) and index.
- ISBN:
- 9780195060096
- 0195060091
- 9780199762576
- 0199762570
- 9780585336350
- 0585336350
- Publisher Number:
- 2027/heb01927 hdl
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